The boldness and brilliance of one-star reviews on Amazon.com

A couple of weeks ago at a Tribune-hosted cocktail party in the Loop, I found myself in a conversation with novelist Richard Ford. I was wearing the baseball hat I'm wearing in the photo that runs with this column, and from the corner of my eye I noticed a man staring at my hat. "You look interesting," Ford said in his quiet Southern drawl, introducing himself. A moment later, he was telling me about his recent pheasant hunting trip, though, to be honest, the only thing I could concentrate on was whether or not I had ever written anything bad about him. All I could think about was this: Richard Ford once spit on novelist Colson Whitehead at a cocktail party.

Whitehead, reviewing Ford's short story collection "A Multitude of Sins" in The New York Times, wrote, "There are a multitude of personality deficits on display, but they rarely approach the level of sin." And so, somewhat later, when Ford found himself in a room with his reviewer, he lobbed a blob of spit at Whitehead.

This rarely happens in the arts.

Probably because, well, reviews of anything as unsparing and personal as Whitehead's tend to be even rarer. It's partly why, when Times dining critic Pete Wells recently took Guy Fieri's new Times Square restaurant to task in a hilariously stinging review ("Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska … supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane?"), and Fieri offered a muted defense on NBC's "Today" show, their mild tussle became news itself. Although The New York Observer had written a much crueler review of Guy's American Kitchen & Bar several weeks earlier — "a restaurant that would be indicted for crimes against humanity, if only that crime fell within the Department of Health's purview" — critical takedowns of that sort have been culturally dormant in recent years. They're a victim of a niceness epidemic spurred on by incestuous, mutual admiration societies, Slate magazine argued last summer.

Slate was talking about literary societies, but it hardly matters: Reviews in general seem tiptoey these days.

Or maybe we're looking in the wrong places.

About a year ago, while shopping online for holiday gifts, I became an unabashed connoisseur of the one-star amateur Amazon review. Here I found the barbed, unvarnished, angry and uncomfortably personal hatchet job very much alive. Indeed, I became so enamored of Amazon's user-generated reviews of books, films and music that my interest expanded to the one-star notices on Goodreads, Yelp and Netflix, where, for instance, a "Moneyball" review notes the movie "did not make you feel warm and fuzzy at the end as a good sports film should." How true! A rare opinion on a critical darling!

As is, to broaden things, a one-star review of "War and Peace" on Goodreads that argues: "I did not find the characters and their lives compelling enough to overcome the annoyance I felt with Tolstoy's personal vision of history and life in general …"

Ouch.

Goodreads' one-star reviews, though, are relatively tempered and thoughtful, lacking the snark that defines a truly lacerating one-star review. Comparably, Amazon is the Wild West, particularly its one-star reviews of the celebrated and the classic. Here you find that "To Kill a Mockingbird," frankly, "sucked … the prejudice part was good. I think it could show people that we need to accept our differences, but it wasn't that deep." Sure, many one-star reviews on Amazon are more concerned with technical than aesthetic issues ("If you care at all about this vital novel, don't purchase the audio cassette version of 'Moby-Dick' read by Burt Reynolds"). And, of course, bad spelling and punctuation (cleaned up in this column) do undermine things.

But where else can you find a reviewer separate from the herd so completely and admit, "I have a lot of patience, but who has the time to sit and read a book that goes on and on about nothing?" The reviewer, identified as an eighth-grader, was unloading on "Great Expectations." Before you argue that these are just the gripes of lazy schoolchildren, here's a review of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" that takes a much longer view: "My only revenge for being forced to read 'Tess' as a kid is to write a negative review as an adult. So there, that's done." Or how about the review of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" that claims it "has an ugly consciousness and mean spirit"? Or a review of "The Wire" that groans "all of the various episodes establish and explore a single, drumming theme: WHY NOTHING IN THIS GODAWFUL CITY EVER CHANGES"?

Or this stunning dismissal of The Clash's "London Calling" that does not mince words: "Blink 182? Good Charlotte? The Clash? Isn't it all the same three-chord pop nonsense?"